Sampling Bavaria`s Charms, From Ludwig`s Castles To Hitler`s Retreat

March 01, 1987|By David Roberts.

BERCHTESGADEN, WEST GERMANY — I had crossed Bavaria five times before, without seeing it once--the effect of careening at nearly 90 miles an hour along the Autobahn between Munich and resorts in the Austrian Alps. Now, as I sat down with a map, I intended to plot a leisurely, longitundinal path from west east along the spine of dark-wooded, crag-strewn Bavaria.

My work had been done for me. The Deutsche Alpenstrasse, or German Alpine Road, winds its many-cornered way from Lindau on Lake Constance to Berchtesgaden in the southeast corner of Germany. The road rates three stars

(``worth a journey``) in the Michelin Guide, which recommends three days for its traverse by car.

With my wife Sharon, I schemed out a much pokier six days between Lindau and Berchtesgaden. A convenient Lufthansa German Airlines schedule allowed us to fly to Frankfurt, rent a car at the airport, drop it off 10 days later in Munich, and catch there the matching return half of our original flight, thus qualifying for a cash-saving ``round trip.``

In that way Sharon and I were able to prefix to the Alpine Road overnights in Frankfurt, Heidelberg, and Freudenstadt, a doughty little town in the heart of the Black Forest.

Lindau, where the Alpine Road begins, is an ancient Swabian village crowded onto a small island near the shore of Lake Constance. It has been a storied resort for so long that generation after generation has crammed it with facilities--churches, a musuem, the well-known Brigands` Tower, waterfront hotels, a train station, trendy shops, a casino, and too many parking lots.

There isn`t room for everything, and at midday the traffic going to and from the island is so intense that residents along the access road have put up angry signs decrying the carbon monoxide wafting in their windows. But at night, Lindau reverts to its serene medieval essence.

We took a twilight walk through its streets enchanted by the stepped Swabian gables of the old houses, the trompe l`oeil facades of town hall and musuem, the 13th Century lighthouse in the harbor just beyond our hotel window.

The next day we drove east through rolling farm-and-cheese country. The mists of Lake Constance gave way to azure skies; the fields seemed to burn green, while on their edges isolated pines kept their dark vigils. We stopped for the day at Hindelang, an exquisite hamlet at the beginning of a switchback pass.

The main reason for our dawdling pace was to give us time for afternoon hikes. We bought a Wanderkarte (trail map) at the grocery and spent six idyllic hours hiking up the Zipfels-Bach, through a steep forest, onto the heaths above timberline, over a limestone ridge, and back to town just at dusk.

At our high point we confronted a sign that read, ``Achtung!

Staatsgrenze.`` My rudimentary German was unequal to the task. It turned out

(as my dictionary later informed me) that we had sauntered into Austria without realizing it.

The next morning in Hindelang--perhaps the loveliest town we came across on our whole journey--we woke to cowbells and the smell of new-mown hay in the meadow outside our window.

Our agenda for the day was the castles of the mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria. These bizarre 19th Century anachronisms are among the most popular tourist attractions in Germany--even among Germans. Indeed, the classic view of madly-upthrusting Neuschwanstein is probably the single most familiar postcard image of Germany itself.

We ambled on a guided tour through Hohenschwangau, a new-Gothic redoubt built by Ludwig`s father, Maximilian II, where the spoiled prince daydreamed out his childhood. The whole castle is devoted to the iconography of the swan. After wading through a mob of admirers, we skipped the more famous Neuschwanstein, which stared down at us from its perch a few miles away, and left to our imaginations its stalactite grotto and its pseudo-Romanesque throne room.

Later in the day we visited Linderhof, deep in Ludwig`s favorite hunting woods. It is a baby-sized Versailles, full of gelatinous Baroque affectations. The most absurd is a fabricated grotto, with fake limestone roof and walls and artificial stalagmites, in which today`s tour groups are dazzled (as were royal guests a century ago) by a light show dramatizing a scene from

``Tannhauser.``

The odd thing is that Ludwig--who blundered away Bavaria`s fortune and power at the cost of many lives while he communed with Wagner, who was so incompetent a ruler that his own nobles kidnapped and deposed him--is revered today as a kind of Arthurian hero. The further wonder is that these kitsch castles built as sandboxes for a dotty monarch are far more popular than the glorious medieval castles that grace the German countryside.